TEENAGE RAY BRADBURY hanging out with Marlene Dietrich. Dude had roller-game.

Check out teenage Ray Bradbury hanging out with the famous movie star Marlene Dietrich. The visionary used to hunt down famous people on his roller skates. You can’t make this sort of shit up. Old Uncle Ray with immaculate game. Or creepy stalking tendencies. However you want to cut it.

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In this picture, you can see the fifteen-year-old Ray Bradbury — long before his famous author days — posing with the incredible movie star and singer Marlene Dietrich. How did this happen?

Over on Dangerous Minds, Tara McGinley contextualizes this odd coupling with a few telling quotes from interviews that Bradbury did over the years. He told Playboy that he’d moved to Hollywood with his family when he was fourteen, and that he loved to chase down movie stars on his roller skates:

I was madly in love with Hollywood . . . I skated all over town, hell-bent on getting autographs from glamorous stars. It was glorious. I saw big MGM stars such as Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Coleman. Or I’d spend all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then zoom over to the Brown Derby to watch the stars coming or going. I’d see Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen—whoever was on the Coast. Mae West made her appearance—bodyguard in tow—every Friday night.

In a LIFE interview, he added:

I still have my autographs and a few roller skate ball bearings left over from those days so long ago. Almost all of the people I met then are gone, but miraculously Marlene and George have survived. The light that comes out of these pictures is a constant rerun of my life as a somewhat silly but always loving boy, terribly reluctant to enter manhood.